Tech Giant Google admitted on Thursday that more than 1000 of the recording of customer conversation were leaked by some of its partners. The news spread like fire as many of Google’s partners were involved as many of those conversations were handed over to a Belgian news Outlet.
These conversations were used by companies like Amazon and Google that used to take clips from the Amazon Echo. The purpose of taking conversations was to improve voice responses using their smart assistant. Meanwhile, there are so many hue and cries as this information is supposed to be kept confidential.
Belgian news site VRT said on Wednesday that one of its contractors provided it with the sample of these leaked sounds. VRT said that it used those clips to identify the people involved in the conversation. It also examined some of the other conversations that Google collects while people say ‘OK Google’ using a phone or any Google product. Besides this, VRT heard customer addresses as well.
Many sources that talked to the publication revealed that the recording also consisted of a woman who was in distress and people talked about her medical conditions.
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Google’s Response on the Leakage
Google’s product manager of search David Monsees said in a blog post,
“We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data”.
Moreover, he said that their security and privacy response team is taking a closer look at the issue. Meanwhile, they are still investigating into this and will soon take some actions.
“We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again”, said Monsees.
Monsees said that as per a data analytic, around 0.2 percent of all the audio snippets are able to be heard. But he in defense said that even those are not associated with any of the user accounts. So here comes the question, how in the world was VRT able to figure out who was involved in the conversations that surfaced to VRT. Monsees went on to say that users can delete the history from Google Voice Assistant by going into its history.
Amazon meanwhile also uses voice clips when people speak of Amazon’s smart device Alexa. In Alexa, users can easily delete their past recordings or stop Alexa from using the clips thus improving Amazon’s service.
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